Devil's Oven

by Laura Benedict

  Where did Claude Dixon fit in?

  “You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?” he said.

  “No. Not ghosts,” she said.

  “How’d you know about this place?” He left her on the road and started through the brush surrounding the cabin site. “I can’t imagine how hard it was to live up here—what? A hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “Maybe they didn’t know it was hard,” she said. “It sure had to be lonely.” She walked around the eastern edge of the site, disappearing behind the small stand of wild rhododendrons.

  He waited for her to appear again.

  It was part of his job to remind people to stay on their guard when they were out in the woods. Snakes, bears, wolves, falling branches. Now there was whatever the hell had killed Claude Dixon to worry about. He never worried for himself. He knew every acre of his territory and knew, for the most part, where the dangers lay. Others depended on him when they got lost or injured or too drunk to find their way out.

  When he broke up parties, or pairs of indiscreet lovers at other sites on Devil’s Oven, people often got belligerent with him. But not here, not at this place. They always went without argument. And if any of them noticed how quiet it was—that it was always empty of birds and squirrels and other animals—they never said anything to him. Was he the only one who noticed? It was definitely quiet today.

  “Jolene,” he said. “Hey!”

  Silence.

  “Shit.” He glanced around the clearing. Why was she playing games with him? He was the one who had brought her up here. Wasn’t it his game?

  “Jolene,” he whispered, wanting to wake her, but knowing at the same time that he shouldn’t.

  After a moment, she opened her eyes, which were as black as her hair, and turned her head just that much so she could look up at him. She smiled the smile of an angel and extended her arms to him like a child.

  He sank down on the hearthstone. What the hell was he doing here? It felt dangerous to be alone with her here.

  “Here I am,” she said. Her voice came from behind him, near the ruined chimney.

  He turned to give her a hard time about playing hide-and-seek, but the words wouldn’t come. There was something different about her. A fragile shell of light surrounded her body. He had always known it was there, hadn’t he? That was how it was between them.

  She touched his shoulder and knelt down in the dirt in front of him.

  When he reached out to stroke her cheek with the back of his hand, she didn’t pull away, but tipped her head back to let his hand trail onto her neck. He ran his fingertips behind her ear and into her hair. He thought she might close her eyes, waiting for him to kiss her, but she stared back at him. For days he had been plagued with the image of her on the trail—lovely but weak, corpselike. A broken woman-child. The way seeing her like that made him feel, he knew he might have injured or even killed her. He hated that feeling, hated himself because of it. But while she was here in front of him, he felt different.

  He leaned forward to kiss her, and she let him.

  The hearthstone was unpolished granite, free of moss and dirt because of all the hikers who had rested there and the lovers who had coupled there. He thought it would be too hard and tried to ease her onto the soft ground, but she told him no. This was the only place, she said. Her hair spread over the stone so that they seemed to be lying on a dark blanket.

  Time felt suspended in that place, but he found he couldn’t hold himself back from her. Her mouth was malleable and warm, but he wanted more. He wanted to turn the whole experience around. He wanted to be inside her first, and do the other later.

  When he began to strip her of her blue jeans, she didn’t resist, but helped him. Her shoes were off, and then his. They were finally naked below the waist, and though at another time he would have taken a moment to touch her smooth, muscled legs and taste the salt of them, now he just wanted her. He wanted—God forgive me and Lila forgive me—to find the depths of her. He wanted to be in the place where he ended and she began and neither of them could tell the difference.

  Jolene’s hands, though small and slight, held on to his arms with a surprising, gentle strength. As she eased her way from beneath him, he found himself lying back on the cold, smooth stone. She straddled him, caressing his member with the hot interior of her thighs, but didn’t let him inside her. Not yet. Something in his mind was screaming for him to overcome her, but when she pressed her lips against his chest, his shoulder, and made her way up to his neck, the screaming faded. He felt her breath on his cheek, close to his ear.

  When she raised her head, he saw her face. So calm. Her eyes were closed, her lips wet. The air between them was cool with the strange, pearl light surrounding her. He moved lower beneath her so he could put his mouth to her breast. Unlike Lila’s small and freckled athletic breasts, Jolene’s were heavy with the promise of nourishment. Satisfaction. He suckled and bit her nipple gently, insistently. She responded with an approving moan and pressed her breasts, her groin, harder against him. He was so lost in the taste of her that they might have remained there for hours. He found he couldn’t be satisfied. He wanted more and more of her.

  Jolene didn’t resist when he gripped either side of her rib cage and pushed her slowly away from him. As soon as they were sitting up, her pelvis still fitted to his, Jolene put her hands to the back of his head and pulled him close again. She kissed him deeply, as though she wouldn’t let him go. She was so small in his arms. He felt as though he might break her with his need.

  He ended the kiss.

  Jolene opened her eyes.

  In them, he saw someone else, someone who wasn’t Jolene. Someone who was far more fierce. Terrifying. He understood then that she wasn’t real, that he could never really know her. But that didn’t matter. It was Jolene in his arms, and Jolene he would have.

  The screaming need started up again in Tripp’s brain. He pressed Jolene onto her back, onto the hearthstone that had been warmed by their bodies. As he entered her, Jolene grimaced for the briefest of seconds, and he wondered for just a moment if he had hurt her. He closed his own eyes so he didn’t see the unfamiliar, knowing smile that spread across Jolene’s face. He was already lost.

  Lost in a flare of light, he could no longer feel her body, but only a stinging wind that passed through his skin. As the blazing light faded back into day, he saw a mass of treetops below him, a white sun over his head. A dream? The air was too cold, his body weightless. His arms were no longer arms, but feathered extensions of the rest of his body, now coal black and sleek. Shifting quickly from one broad ribbon of wind to another, he felt powerful, like a threat. It was a feeling he could get used to.

  The trees below him were coming on fast, but he didn’t panic. With a tilt of a wing, he righted himself, and drifted through a tangle of branches to land on a naked poplar.

  Below, a man’s body lay sprawled on a rude dirt trail, eyes open and arms thrown wide as though to receive him. He lifted from the poplar branch and landed beside the bloodied head. He was close enough to tip forward and peck at the man’s open eyes—a sudden temptation. Instead he pinched the scalp above the ear with the point of his beak and tugged away a chunk of oily brown hair. He took a few steps, picking at the soil with his delicate feet, then rose into the air. Effortless.

  He coasted above the forest’s stark canopy for a moment, and saw a woman climbing the trail, a hatchet swinging at her side. I know her, know why she’s here. She is my purpose. Seeing his shadow race ahead of her, she looked up and stumbled after him for a few steps. He heard her cry out but kept on, up, up the mountain.

  There was a certain tree he was looking for, the path to it seared into his brain. The forest thinned as he flew along the mountain’s ridge, the clusters of hemlocks and oaks separated by scrub and rock.

  Spotting the cedar, he landed on the ragged edge of an eagle’s ruined aerie that clung to a single upper limb. The scorched remnant of the second limb that had s
upported it for fifty years had wedged itself among living branches a few feet away. His treasures looked lonesome in the basin of the five-foot-deep nest. A rock-hard green beetle’s carapace, a rusting bell that looked heavy enough to pull him to earth as he flew, a broken rattlesnake’s egg. He hobbled among them, stopping to duck his head beneath a wing to root a mite out of his silver-black underfeathers. He rested, protected from the winds by the weave of twigs and glut of rabbit, fox, and mice bones, but when he felt his energy return, he covered his treasures with crisp brown leaves and took off again.

  The woman wasn’t hard to find. She moved slowly, dragging her feet in the dirt. There was nothing bright about her, nothing interesting or remarkable. No buttons or buckles on her heavy wool cloak or the front of the bloody nightgown on which it opened. Her black hair clutched at her face in the wind.

  He called out to her. She stopped.

  When he spoke the woman didn’t raise her head, but only her eyes, one clear and moist, its black iris round and perfect, the other weeping red from infection.

  “You’re not finished,” he told her. “If you don’t hurry, they’ll wake. You don’t want them to wake.” He felt his own heart quivering against his breast.

  “I can’t,” she said, sounding uncertain.

  “They’ve touched evil,” he said.

  “Innocent,” she said.

  He dropped down to a branch on a level with her weary face.

  “His seed,” he said.

  The man’s body was well out of sight down the trail, but she looked over her shoulder as though he might appear beside her at any second.

  His hearing wasn’t as good as other birds’—where are the other animals? We seem to be the only living creatures here—but he could hear her blood whispering through her body.

  “He took the salt this time,” she said. Now she brought a roughly finished box with a black iron catch from beneath her cloak. “He wasn’t coming back. We made it through the winter, but he meant to leave us without salt. He meant us to die.” There was passion in her voice. She was remembering.

  “His seed,” he said.

  He flew from the rhododendron, leaving the branch bouncing gently behind him. She stared at the space where he had been.

  • • •

  It was only late morning, but the forest was filled with a lead dusk. After going back once more to check on his treasures, he flew to the cabin and perched on a bit of branch protruding from the roof.

  The woman hadn’t wasted any time.

  The wailing from inside the cabin sounded no different to him than the distant cries of a family of rabbits or opossums set on by coyotes. He listened.

  The black-haired girl came out of the cabin, naked, falling once, twice, as she tried to run. An endless, feral scream rose from deep in her undeveloped chest. Her face and arms were streaked with blood.

  He could hear the angry murmur of the woman’s blood before he saw the woman herself. But the girl could see her. Finally the girl’s voice came, filling the tidy clearing and the woods beyond.

  “Mamaaaaaa! Mama, no!”

  She stared at her mother, frozen, the gash along her jawline weeping red.

  The woman came into view, shrieking obscenities. The girl turned to run.

  At first he could only see the top of the woman’s head and the shoulders of her raw linen gown, which billowed in the rising wind. She cradled some small thing in the crook of one arm, and carried the hatchet—now purple with blood—in the other hand. The smell that rose up caused a shudder in his wings.

  Beyond them, the white of the girl’s skin flashed in the trees.

  The woman looked to the sky and howled. When the sound faded into the wind, she swung around and looked up at him.

  “You!” she said. “For you!” She dropped the hatchet and used both hands to thrust the thing out to him.

  He bowed his head and absently groomed the nearest chest feathers. He didn’t need to look at the thing in her arms. Its smell alone threatened to overwhelm him.

  Giving out a shattering caaaaaaw, he swept from the roof, flying close enough to her head to catch one of her long black hairs on his foot.

  As he rose in the sky, she started after him, pressing the pitiable thing in her hand firmly onto the pointed fencepost at the front of the yard.

  • • •

  The girl was stronger and faster than the woman. He followed, dodging trees as he flew. He tried calling after her, but only the woman could hear his language, only the woman could act. And she was falling farther and farther behind them. He could no longer hear the sound of her blood. Disappointment wasn’t in his nature, but he sensed he was about to fail. The girl would be lost to him.

  He dove at her head and she tried to beat him away as she ran. The second time he dove, she glanced his wing and he wheeled to the ground, stunned. The girl fell as well.

  She sobbed, her breath coming short. He kept an eye on her as he righted himself, wary that she would try to hurt him again. She was a pretty thing, pale as dawn. Her eyes were as black as her hair, as black as her mother’s. In another life she might have made a pet of him, letting him sit on her shoulder and eat from her plate.

  The woman appeared, tearing through the bracken to reach the girl.

  He waited. Watched. There would be more blood, and it would end.

  The girl didn’t run or stand to try to subdue the Fury that her mother had become. Lying prone, she turned with a languor more suited to a bed of down than one of brittle leaves and twigs. She scraped a portion of earth into her hand, then put it to her lips, mixing it with the blood already there.

  He could hear her whisper even over her mother’s screams.

  “Mountain, hide me.”

  He felt the ground beneath him shudder.

  The woman stumbled and fell, her voice silenced.

  The girl held on to the dirt, letting the spasms of the earth move through her body. She looked apprehensive but not afraid, as though she knew what was coming but not what to think about it.

  He flew to a low branch well away from her.

  The ground beneath the girl swelled, prying tree roots and rocks from the dirt. The roots snapped free; half-dead branches fell like heavy rain around them. It might have been the birth throes of a second mountain on the face of Devil’s Oven. Even the tree in which he was perched began to tip and fall. He flew to a second tree farther away. The earth crested, groaning, and lifted the girl as high as a full-grown dogwood tree. Trees continued to break and fall, but none of them touched the girl. From this distance he wasn’t distracted by the bloody violation of her body. She was white against the dirt, soft against the crust of the mountain.

  Then the risen land began to fall back onto itself. The girl held fast.

  He flew from the branch to circle above her. He saw the look of calm acceptance on her face.

  At the last moment, before the ground covered her completely, she raised one hand to the sky. To him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Lila stripped off her nightgown and panties and put on the delicious spa robe Bud had bought for her on their last trip out west. She checked the bedside clock—she was way overdue for another sedative. Her back and neck muscles were tight with stress, but a good hour in the hot tub would help with that. Though she had begun to think it was possible she would never feel clean, never feel human again.

  Her cell phone sat nearby in its charger. Bud had reminded her to turn it on, and she had, but as soon as he was out of the room, she turned it off again. Her parents were freaking out, begging her to come and stay with them in the city “until that horrible killer is caught.” God knew how many messages she had from Tripp.

  Every time she closed her eyes, she saw one of two things: Claude Dixon’s lump of a body in the blinding relief of her headlights, or Tripp’s face—or what was supposed to be Tripp’s face staring down at her as he carried her from the woods. But that pinched mask, with its unfocused eyes, creased jowls, and
gray, hollowed cheeks, couldn’t have been the man she had been sleeping with off and on for the past year. The man she trusted almost as much as Bud. What in the hell had happened to him? He had called her by that slut’s name. Jolene.

  In her heart she knew he hadn’t messed with the girl, but she suddenly wanted to be free of him. It was as if Claude’s murder had woken her from some spell Tripp had cast over her.

  He had always been on the strange side, with his computer geek friends and the way he’d stayed away from sports in school. If any of the girls she had hung out with at school found out she’d been sleeping with him, they would laugh.

  But then.

  She couldn’t help herself after he pursued her for almost a year, showing up on her walking route, at the few restaurants in the area, at the grocery store, at the gym. Never pressuring her, but letting her know she was looking good, that he was there. Ready when she was. As old school friends in a small town, no one seemed to think it was unusual that they would spend fifteen minutes chatting, having coffee. Not even Bud. When she finally let herself fall into it, fall into him, it had felt familiar and wonderfully new at the same time. She didn’t even have the excuse of being unhappy with Bud.

  Tripp had been good to her, hadn’t he? Almost as good as Bud, in his way. She had been a shit to them both.

  It didn’t matter now, though. This Tripp was a different person.

  If she dumped him completely, would he tell the police in revenge that she’d been at the cabin that night? And if he was a different person, had he become the kind who might murder someone? No, she didn’t think so. He had been standing on the porch when Claude’s body came shooting out of the woods. But if she hadn’t seen it for herself? Maybe he was still capable of it.

  • • •

  In the kitchen, she pinched off a still-warm corner of the banana nut bread Danelle had baked that morning, and made a snack of wheat crackers and honey with a few baby carrots on the side. She ate more when Bud was around because he seemed to worry if she didn’t eat as much as he thought she needed to. Since she’d hit the down side of her thirties, she had begun to notice she couldn’t eat like she had only a year earlier. But she was hungry even now, stressed out as she was.